We are very good at spotting what other people should do. A friend's relationship is plainly wrong. Somebody's career choice is a disaster waiting to happen. That stranger in the supermarket should know better. Given five minutes and a cup of tea, most of us can devise a complete improvement programme for somebody else's life.
Our own lives are more complicated, naturally. We know the history, the obligations, the things we haven't mentioned and the rather embarrassing decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. Other people's lives tend to arrive in convenient little summaries. We respond to the summary and wonder why our advice is ignored.
This is one reason I have always been wary of systems that begin with an answer. They may offer something genuinely useful, but the answer has arrived before we've understood the question. The person asking for help then has to squeeze themselves into the method, when perhaps the method should be examined instead.
Consider two people who say they cannot make a decision. One is frightened of upsetting somebody they love. The other cannot tell the difference between what they want and what they have spent years being told to want. Both might describe themselves as indecisive. Hand them the same motivational speech and you may help neither.
We do this outside therapy as well. We tell teenagers to be confident when they are trying to work out who they are. We tell exhausted parents to organise their time. We tell lonely people to join clubs. Sometimes the advice is sensible. Sometimes it lands with all the usefulness of telling somebody in the rain to try being drier.
The temptation comes from a decent place, often enough. We want things to improve. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. An answer gives us the pleasant sensation of progress. Listening properly is harder because it may reveal that the situation cannot be neatly reduced to a problem with three solutions.
And listening may require us to change our minds. We might discover that the ambitious person does not want the promotion, the apparently shy person enjoys solitude, or the couple everybody thinks should separate have a relationship nobody outside it understands. That doesn't mean every choice is wise. It means we ought to know what we're judging.
There is another possibility worth considering. People sometimes know perfectly well what they could do next. What they lack is room to work out whether they can live with the consequences. Another person's certainty can take that room away.
I would like to see a little less eagerness to fix and a little more curiosity. What is actually happening here? How did it become this way? What has already been tried? What would change if the obvious answer were wrong? Those questions are less impressive than a confident prescription. They are also rather more likely to lead somewhere useful.
Of course, I might be wrong about your situation. That's precisely the point.